Mathematics: Year In Review 1993

The outstanding mathematical event of the year, of the decade, and perhaps even of the century was the announcement in June 1993 of a proof for Fermat’s last theorem by Andrew Wiles (see BIOGRAPHIES)--a quiet, rather diffident Englishman working at Princeton University. Mathematics has several notorious unsolved problems, and the puzzle posed by the French number theorist Pierre de Fermat over 350 years ago is one of the most notorious of them all.

Number theory--the study of the deeper properties of whole numbers--goes back to Diophantus of Alexandria, who flourished about AD 250 and wrote a book called ... (100 of 802 words)